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Cornel vs Cory

American parents have registered 133,778 Corys since 1880, against 1,174 Cornels. Cory is still ahead, with 174 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Cornel against Cory, 1880 to 2025 0 2k 4k 6k 8k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Cornel Cory

Each line is every baby given the name that year, girls and boys added together — the only count that means the same thing for both names. A line breaks where the name fell below five babies in a year — the point at which the SSA stops publishing it — rather than being drawn through a figure nobody published. A single published year in a gap shows as a dot.

Who was ahead

Of the 99 years in which either name was published, Cory for 81 years and Cornel for 18 years. The lead changed hands 3 times.

Side by side

  Cornel Cory
Total US births 1,174133,778
Most in one year 596,660
Babies in 2025 under 5174
Estimated living today 850125,000
Median age today 5738
Peak year 19471989
Best rank 906th boys61st boys
Rank in 2025 unranked1,244th
First recorded 19191924
Girls / boys 0 / 1,1746,599 / 127,179

A rank is a position within one sex’s list for one year, so the two rank rows are not subtracted from one another and the winning column is not marked on them. The living figure is a life-table estimate, not a count.

Which name is older

Half of the Cornels alive today are over 57; half the Corys are over 38. That is 19 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Where each one is strongest

How much commoner the name is in that state than it is nationally, from births recorded since 1910.

Both names abroad

Countries whose statistics office publishes both names, so the comparison can be made somewhere other than the United States.

Country Cornel Cory
England and Wales 103,185
France 5280

Every spelling a country files separately is added together, over whatever years that country publishes — which is not the same range in any two of them, so read the columns against each other and not the rows.

Compare something else

Related comparisons

Social Security Administration birth records, 1880–2025, public domain. Full histories: Cornel and Cory.